No Haven

In the past decade, New Haven has pioneered nearly every program in the Great Society's lexicon. Months and years before the Federal Government showed any interest in the cities, it had its own poverty and manpower-training projects, a rent-supplement demonstration, and a promising Head Start program. Washington has rewarded the city's imaginative urban-renewal administration with a greatly disproportionate share of federal renewal money--$852 per capita (given or pledged), or six times as much as Philadelphia, in terms of population, 17 times as much as Chicago, 20 times as much as New York. Indeed, Robert Weaver, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, once observed that New Haven (pop. 142,000) came closest to "our dream of a slumless city." Yet last week the model city was racked with the same virus of ghetto discontent that has plagued scores of other U.S. cities this summer.

Global Promises. Compared with Detroit or Newark, New Haven's four troubled nights constituted only a miniriot. Not a shot was fired, no one was seriously injured, and damage was probably not more than $1,000,000. But the psychological damage was immense. "I seriously thought," said a shaken Mayor Richard Lee, "that something like this wouldn't happen here." Yet happen it did, and officials across the country, shuddering at the prospects for their own cities, could only wonder why. The reasons were not all that obscure. Much had been done, but much more remained to be done.

The unemployment rate of the city's 36,000 Negroes and Puerto Ricans is still nearly three times (8%) that of whites. The schools are still heavily segregated, and the white majority, largely of Irish and Italian background, is reluctant to integrate them. The Irish-dominated police department still shows hostility toward the newer migrants, and badly needs reorganization--as urged in a recent report to the mayor.

New Haven's very success, together with the glare of national publicity, may have contributed to the sense of frustration. People who lived in dilapidated housing in the largely Negro Hill and Dixwell areas may simply have grown tired of hearing that their city was doing more than any other to house its poor. To many, the gap between Weaver's dream and everyday reality became intolerable. "We've been telling the Negro that there's a new day," notes Mitchell Sviridoff, who left New Haven's poverty program last year to become head of New York City's Human Resources Administration* "But there is no new day. He gets big, global promises, but nothing happens."

The Long & the Short. "New Haven is only relatively the best city," adds Edward Logue, another famous alumnus of Lee's administration, who resigned as Boston's renewal administrator last July to campaign for the mayoralty. For all New Haven's success in tapping the federal treasury, Logue, Sviridoff, and the men who run the city's programs fault the Government for being too stingy. "The cities," says Logue, "just aren't a priority item any place but at city hall. The Government is long on eloquence and short on funding." Dick Lee, a short (5 ft. 7 in.), scrappy fighter who has wrapped his life as tightly around his city as any mayor in America, would agree. "For everything we've done," he says, "there are five things we haven't done, or five things we've failed at. If New Haven is a model city, then God help urban America."

There are, says Mike Sviridoff, four key factors in keeping the city cool. The first is the mayor and his ability to communicate. The second is the police department and its skill in dealing with minorities. The third is the quality of antipoverty programs. The fourth, quite simply, is luck. "New Haven," he says ruefully, "ran out of that one."

*And will leave that post this fall to head the Ford Foundation's division for national affairs.

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